


Where They Have To Take You In

by Sixthlight



Category: Rivers of London - Ben Aaronovitch
Genre: Canon Compliant, Canon Relationships, Gen, Post-Book: Lies Sleeping, Pre-Book: False Value, Slice of Life, Team Belgravia, Team Folly
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-26
Updated: 2020-08-26
Packaged: 2021-03-07 01:13:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,390
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26118574
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sixthlight/pseuds/Sixthlight
Summary: Peter returns to the Folly; plus ça change.
Relationships: Peter Grant & Thomas Nightingale
Comments: 18
Kudos: 217
Collections: Fandom Trumps Hate 2020





	Where They Have To Take You In

**Author's Note:**

  * For [geepard](https://archiveofourown.org/users/geepard/gifts).



“It’s like you’d rather be somewhere else,” Stephanopoulos said, looking at me disapprovingly. “And here I thought you couldn’t wait to be back on the job.”

I pushed back from my desk at Belgravia and flexed my fingers, which were on the verge of cramping. Paperwork, it turns out, is something you should ease back into, just like anything else you haven’t done for a while. Unfortunately for me, it is a fact of the Job that breathing accumulates paperwork, at least if your rank is anything under DS. Above that you get to delegate.

“Of course not, boss,” I said to her. The glint in her eye told me she knew I was buttering her up, but she let it go. “This just wasn’t the way I saw my first day back going.”

I glanced sideways at Sahra Guleed’s empty desk – she was in Hong Kong, meeting Michael Cheung’s family. Across from us, David Carey’s old desk was occupied by a DC I didn’t know. I did know that her name was Sally Lin and she’d transferred here from Bristol and was, like any officer who ended up working for DCI Seawoll or DI Stephanopoulos, considered to be Going Places. I’d heard all that from one of the data analysts who’d been on Operation Jennifer and was now back at Belgravia. But I’d been too bogged down in paperwork to actually introduce myself.

“David’s not coming back,” Stephanopoulos said, following my gaze and completely misreading my train of thought. “I assume Sahra told you that.”

“Yeah,” I said, even though she hadn’t. Carey had emailed me last month, before my suspension had been lifted, after the whole thing with the whales and the unicorns and the unscheduled trip to Fairyland. He’d told me he didn’t want me to blame myself. I wasn’t sure if that was him or his therapist, but I appreciated the thought. It wasn’t me I blamed, anyway.

Stephanopoulos was scrutinizing me for my reaction, so I smiled at her in a way that hopefully looked regretful but not brooding. Beverley tells me I’m not very good at brooding.

“Get on with it, then,” Stephanopoulos said, and left me to it, so I think I got it right. 

About half an hour later I started at the sensation of something cold and wet snuffling around my ankle. Toby let out a tiny whine.

“Hey, boy,” I said, giving him a pat, and he jumped up to say hello. I looked up to see Nightingale standing next to the desk.

“Detective Constable Grant,” he said, with a formal nod. Then he spoiled it by grinning at me. “Fancy seeing you here.”

“Meeting?” I said. “I’ll just keep Toby with me, shall I?”

“As entertaining as it would doubtless be…I did think you might watch him. I don’t expect I’ll be long.” He leant over, gave Toby a firm pat, and headed off, typing something one-handed on his phone as he went – you couldn’t have told him from any other forty-ish DCI, if you didn’t know his very long story.

Toby lay down obediently next to me.

“I’m not going to be there all the time, you know,” I told him. “It’s just going to be the odd walk now and again. Maybe a few more when I go on paternity leave. How do you feel about kids, Toby?”

Toby continued to pant happily, so I presumed he was fine with that. Of course I’d already told him about the Bump, but I don’t think it ranked very highly on Toby’s priority list, so it didn’t hurt to remind him.

I texted a picture of me and Toby to Bev; she texted back _Hard at work, then, are you?_

_That’s right,_ I replied. _Can’t do it without my right-hand dog._

*

I don’t like making arrests if I don’t have to. It’s a lot of paperwork and, as it happens, the people you’re arresting tend to get a bit upset about it, a decent portion of them anyway. Some of them know it’s coming and go quiet, and for some of them it seems like a relief. That’s almost harder to deal with than the ones who go apeshit.

Back at the beginning of the year, I’d spent quite a lot of time imagining which category Chorley would fall into, when we got him. I think he would have gone quiet, once he figured out he couldn’t get away. It didn’t matter now. That wasn’t a good feeling either – if you’re wondering.

I hadn’t thought about him at all this morning. I’d let myself anticipate how today would go; how I was going to get up and put on my suit, not my court-and-funerals suit but my work suit, and kiss Bev goodbye as she finished zipping up her wetsuit and headed out the garden door to her river. How I was going to drive to the Folly and park next to the Ferrari, how Toby was going to greet me at the door and I’d laugh and tell him to get down. How Molly and Foxglove were going to appear out of nowhere and scare the shit out of me but I wasn’t going to mind. How Nightingale would come down the main stairs and shake my hand and tell me he was glad to have me back on the job, and then tell me I couldn’t get away with shirking my practice or my Greek any more. How the mundane library would smell of books and wood and knowledge. How Molly would bring us cake and coffee in the mid-afternoon, and maybe Abdul or Jennifer would drop by. How I’d text Sahra a picture of the cake and tell her she was missing out, knowing that overnight she’d text me back a picture of some fabulous meal in Hong Kong.

But instead Stephanopoulos had called me to remind me that now I was back on the job, there was a very large pile of documents with my name on them at Belgravia, and best they got cleared out of the way first thing, unless I had something higher-priority on my plate, like a stray basilisk or some mermaids. Oh, no, nothing like that in the offing? Then I could come in on my way to the Folly.

Some days I reckoned that my life had actually been easier when Stephanopoulos and Seawoll _didn’t_ believe in magic.

There’d been a lot of documents piled up about what had happened; I thought we’d cleared that all away with my suspension and reinstatement, but…apparently not. I flipped through them as quickly as possible and tried not to think about it too hard. It was just paperwork.

Now it was well past lunch and I was still going, mostly because I’d been interrupted all morning by people saying hello. The DC at Carey’s desk, Lin, hadn’t introduced herself, just kept giving me sideways glances with the look of someone who’d heard some of the more exaggerated stories about my career. Not _untrue_ , exactly. Just…exaggerated, and prone to making junior officers think I might be contagious. But what she said when she came over to introduce herself was “It’s exciting to meet the famous DC Grant.”

“Is it?” I said, and realised that I sounded horrifically like Nightingale or Stephanopoulos or somebody.

“Yes,” she said, nodding. Oh, those hadn’t been looks of potential contagion at all; they’d been looks of…respect?

That was new.

I wondered what they’d done with the betting pool. I was, after all that, back on the job.

*

Nightingale offered me a lift back to the Folly after his meeting, saying that there wasn’t much space to park with all the builders’ vans. They hadn’t disassembled the Annex yet.

“Are there that many of them?”

“More every day, it seems like,” he said as we walked to the Jag. “And the timeline has already been extended by two weeks.”

“If it stays under an extra month then we’re in luck.” I’d pored over all the plans, of course, but I hadn’t been back to the Folly while I was suspended. Even if I’d visited as Molly’s guest (Abigail’s suggestion), it was something I didn’t want to have to lie about if it came up at a later date. It was even more officially a Met workplace than it had been before Operation Jennifer. “Longer if they find something structural that needs to be fixed.”

“Knock on wood,” Nightingale said, tapping his cane, “they haven’t yet. There were substantial renovations in the twenties and they seem to have held up.”

“The twenties aren’t happening for another four years,” I reminded him; he made a face. Sometimes he’s sanguine about the length of his lifespan and sometimes he’s not. It’s the major difference I’ve noticed between him and Oberon, or any of the older Rivers. Mind you, they’ve all got a good century on him.

He was right about the builders, though – there were loads of them, and with the plastic sheets and warning signs and the tiles from the atrium floor in great tarpaulin-covered stacks against the west wall, the place was almost unrecognizable. Toby immediately trotted towards the kitchen, which I presumed was the same as it had ever been. We’d suggested renovations to Molly (I’d been on Skype at the time) and she had made it emphatically clear that she wasn’t interested. Although Nightingale had said that he thought she might appreciate a food processor for Christmas.

Molly and Foxglove appeared about three second after Toby was out of sight. Foxglove was visibly pleased to see me and clapped her hands together, bouncing on her toes. Molly gave me a good inspection and poked disapprovingly at a small piece of mud on my upper left-hand jacket sleeve. Then she gestured to me to take it off. Ah yes; I was definitely back at the Folly.

“It’s good to see you too,” I said, handing it over and wondering what my odds were of getting it back before I had to leave. There was an outside possibility this was a hostage situation, but what Molly didn’t know was that I’d only taken _most_ of my clothes to Bev’s, foreseeing exactly this. Well not really – I’d just been dealing with too much to pack everything I owned up – but it might be handy now.

“The lab should still be an adequate practice space for you,” Nightingale said. “Abigail’s little mishap last week has been cleaned up. I understand your mother gave her some salutary advice.”

“Mum’s cleaned a lot of hotels,” I said. “Some light carbonisation is nothing.”

We talked for a bit about second-order _adjectivae_. After months of lessons in the more casual environment of Bev’s house, or over Skype, it struck me that this sort of coversation would once have involved me asking a lot of questions that Nightingale would refuse to answer until some later point. Now it involved several suggestions for books I could consult. The Folly was changing, but I was changing too. Or was that Nightingale? Or – never mind. Time for practice.

I got a whole hour alone to practice (something that wasn’t that common at home these days, what with younger sisters and Russian acolytes and older sisters and university friends, not that I minded any of those things) before Nightingale came back. He said he was there to observe. I only flubbed one and a half attempts after he showed up, which was pretty good really. This was a fifth-order spell, used for manipulating a lot of small objects very precisely. Traditionally, Nightingale said, it had been used for assembling and disassembling clockwork. He’d dug up an original Meccano set for me to practice with, which twelve-year-old me would have been thrilled by. Twenty-eight-year-old me wasn’t too displeased either.

I noticed a bit after Nightingale came in that Foxglove was sitting cross-legged on one of the dis-used lab benches, sketching furiously. There was a good chance she’d been there all along.

“She does that,” Nightingale said, following my glance. “You get used to it after a while. We, er, did have to set some rules about private and public space. I’m really not sure why Molly didn’t explain that to her.”

I was trying so hard not to laugh I _totally_ messed up my next go at the _formae,_ sending tiny bits of metal flying everywhere, but it made a good drawing when Foxglove showed it to us later – and she helped us pick up the ones that had landed in odd corners.

Afterwards we went down to the kitchen for afternoon tea, since the atrium was a building zone. Molly had the range on, so it was toasty warm. We sat there in our shirtsleeves, which isn’t much to write home about for me but Nightingale never did the first couple of months I lived here. It occurred to me that it was about as long between then and now as it had been between me signing up as a PCSO and when I’d joined the Folly. It definitely felt a lot shorter than that; I could blame it on near-death experiences, or I could blame it on multiple trips to Fairyland. I liked that option better.

Molly served us some sort of berry-flavoured mousse cake, which I was reasonably sure was another Bake-Off special. I said as much to Nightingale, who said he couldn’t confirm but wouldn’t be surprised.

“It’s good to be home,” I said.

Nightingale gave me a considering look. “I understand that this is no longer your mailing address. And –” he looked down at his phone “– I am informed that you’re expected back by seven unless there’s a very good reason otherwise.”

“I think my life was easier before you and Bev exchanged phone numbers.”

He smiled innocently at me, but I didn’t buy it for a second. They knew what they were doing.

I looked down at my cake, or rather the remnants of it. I hadn’t let myself think about how much I’d missed the Folly until I was back. All of it; the whole ridiculous building and all its inhabitants.

“Home…can be a lot of places, I reckon. You’re not getting rid of me that easily.”

“Well,” Nightingale said, leaning back in his chair. “I didn’t expect we would.”


End file.
